I last flew into Sarajevo on 28 June 1994. The besieged city was momentarily quiet. Forces loyal to Milosevic and Karadzic looked down from the hills, but a demilitarisation agreement was holding...
It would be best not to have to die at all, but failing that, many of us would like to have some control over the time and manner of our deaths, should we find ourselves in a condition so...
Writers have seldom been strangers at the scene of an execution. As we know from his London Journal, James Boswell would think nothing of tipping up at Tyburn after a bit of the Old Peculiar on...
‘Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things,’ Virgil wrote, thinking of Lucretius. But for many, knowing the causal origins of things can be reason for anxiety....
There is plenty of evidence about the religious beliefs of the ‘plain man’ in early modern England, but it tells us more about the devout and the learned than it does about the...
Where might you seek Jerusalem? You could start in Bologna, which since at least the ninth century CE has boasted a Jerusalem theme park called Santo Stefano, a complex of churches and chapels...
Here are the nominees for the greatest bad argument in political theory. They are: Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the
He was ‘unquestionably a great and good man’. Who could forget ‘his gigantic stature, his warm temperament, his good health and good humour, his bull-necked obstinacy, his...
For more than three hundred years the UK’s constitution has functioned remarkably well on the basis of the historic compromise reached in the course of the 17th century. The 1689 Bill of...
I took the train to Hasa today. The station at Dammam, near the Persian Gulf, is clean and spacious. But security dealt with me as though I was getting on a plane to Kandahar. Families with...
When Ernest Gellner was teaching at the Central European University in Prague in 1995, the last year of his life, he cultivated informal social relations with the graduate students there. One...
Fortunate is the reader seeking the story of early Christianity in Britain. At its heart is one of the greatest and most readable of medieval historians, the Venerable Bede, and its modern...
Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this...
‘Leave my brain alone,’ the dorky hero says in Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom, when mental fitness comes up: ‘I get my brain training from Sudoku and Alain de Botton’s...
Most of the world’s religions have their holy places, thought to offer closer access to the divinity. Sometimes they are associated with key events in the history of the religion concerned....
Sometimes, when I’m feeling dyspeptic, I wonder why psychologists have such a down on minds. Psychologists, of all people. In philosophy, ever since Plato, the mainstream opinion has been...
Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written...
In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate...